Today is Asteroid Day. It’s only the second annual Asteroid Day, so I don’t feel that bad having it sneak up on me like this. I have set five reminders on three different calendar apps just to make sure I don’t miss the 4th of July. Otherwise I end up assuming Chicago is being attacked by Green Bay and lock myself in the bunker until the rockets stop (usually only takes about four days until they run out of roman candles, jet screamers, black cats and Shoot the Moon tubes).

Asteroid Day is held on the anniversary of the largest asteroid impact in Earth’s recent history – an event that took place in Siberia on June 30, 1908, known as the Tunguska explosion. A small asteroid apparently exploded over Tunguska, Siberia. It released the equivalent of 100 tons of TNT, devastating an area of about 800 square miles, the size of a major metropolitan city.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is also an Asteroid Day partner. ESA asteroid specialists will be participating at events in Barcelona, Munich and Heidelberg. Ian Carnelli, project manager for ESA’s proposed Asteroid Impact Mission, spoke from the ESTEC technical centre at Noordwijk, the Netherlands:

Asteroid Day media partner, Discovery Science will dedicate the entire day on June 30 to asteroid programming.

Of course, we all know about Tunguska from Ghostbusters. Don’t we? Did none of you listen to Ray? Gozer the Gozerian’s arrival was the biggest interdimensional cross rip since the Tunguska Blast of 1909!

Asteroid Day will be chock full of movies, concerts and knowledge whatsits (full schedule here).

Check out Twitter, if you’re into pound signs and texting into The Great Void.

I figured I would watch some crappy horror movie that is tangentially related. It turns out all the movies featuring asteroids that have ever been made are, more or less, crappy.

Not the fun kind of crappy either. Just crappy. The newest being the worst of the bunch – Armageddon, Deep Impact, Asteroid, Meteor, Deadly Skies, Meteor Apocalypse, The Apocalypse. You get the idea.

The old classics aren’t nearly as bad, but they are also not easy to come by. Despite U-verse, Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, the only ones on tap right now seem to be Phantom Planet and Phantom from Space. The Day the Sky Exploded is just not in the cards for today. I’m not in the mood for phantoms of any sort or zombies for that matter, so Night of the Comet is off the menu as well.

What to do?

The Blob, 1958 version, obviously. This movie always creeped me out as a kid. The blob is just relentless and it manages to get a lot done without seeming to have any real skills or intelligence. It just keeps growing and growing, eating everything that dares to touch it.

Kind of reminds me of the legion of Trump supports. We should have never poked it with that stick.

Besides, it has Steve McQueen, who is the coolest of the cool. Even when some asshole blob ruins his date with Aneta Corsaut.

In the end, they subdue the blob, but not by killing it. They freeze it in the Arctic. Can we take a hint from them with regards to Trump? McQueen’s character responds to a comment that the blob has been stopped with the film’s final words, “Yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold.”